The time had arrived for the Muslims to punch back. On April 27, 1962, about six weeks before Cassius Clay met Malcolm X, a melee broke out between police officers and members of the Nation’s Los Angeles mosque. It all began when two black men standing behind the open trunk of a car were stopped by white policemen in a parking lot a few doors away from the mosque. As the officers frisked them, a crowd of angry Muslims gathered. In a matter of minutes, chaos erupted, shots were fired, and the Muslims retreated for safety. Squad cars of backup officers rushed to the scene. Policemen raided the mosque and randomly struck black men with nightsticks. The next morning, the Los Angeles Times announced in bold print: “‘muslims’ riot: Cultist Killed, Policeman Shot.”5
When the gun smoke cleared, one Muslim—Ronald Stokes, the secretary of the mosque—was dead, another was paralyzed, and five others had been wounded. All but one of the policemen’s bullets hit the Muslims in their backs. The LAPD booked fourteen black men on suspicion of assault with intent to kill. The Times described “the blazing gunfight” like it was the shootout at the O.K. Corral. Beneath the newspaper headline was a picture of Stokes, handcuffed and lying facedown in a pool of blood.6
When Malcolm heard the news, he wept for Stokes, whom he had known since 1960. Enraged, he swiftly buried his sadness and prepared for revenge. In Harlem, he confided to his assistant ministers that he planned to organize vigilantes. But Elijah Muhammad ordered him to stand down. “Brother, you don’t go to war over a provocation,” he told him. “They could kill a few of my followers but I’m not going to go out and do something silly.” Muhammad sent Raymond Sharrieff to Los Angeles, where the Supreme Captain of the Fruit ensured that there was no coordinated retaliation.7
Without authorization to retaliate, Malcolm instead escalated his rhetoric. On May 4, a week after the shooting, Malcolm held a press conference in Los Angeles at the Statler Hilton Hotel and accused the police of murdering Stokes. “Seven innocent unarmed black men were shot down in cold blood by Police Chief William Parker’s Los Angeles City Police,” he charged. He thought that Parker, who sometimes pronounced Negroes as “Niggras,” was guilty of “filling his own men with hatred of the black community” and spreading lies about the Muslims. In Los Angeles, Malcolm argued, blacks lived under a “police state,” just like the “Jews in Nazi Germany.”8
The following morning, Malcolm conducted Stokes’s funeral at the two-story mosque, where more than two thousand blacks packed the old stucco lodging hall. Although white journalists were barred from entering the building, black reporters told the Los Angeles Times that the minister delivered a moving tribute for the Muslims’ “fallen warrior.” Outside the mosque, hundreds of mourners lined both sides of Broadway, watching the pallbearers carry Stokes’s body in a gray casket. Some men bitterly complained about Elijah Muhammad’s warning against revenge. Others were so angry that they renounced Muhammad and left the Los Angeles mosque all together. If the black man was ever going to be truly free, they declared, he had to defend himself.9
Standing near the hearse, a tall, lean black man with a shaved head, dressed in a dark suit, faced a photographer from the Times. Fixing his gaze on the camera, he struck a militant pose, raising his fist in what would later become known as a Black Power salute. His clenched fist signified defiance, assertiveness, and liberation. The Times didn’t identify the man by name, but in his silent rage for justice, his gesture spoke eloquently about a burgeoning movement that had no name.
Muhammad sent word that the Muslims should head out into the street and “begin the war with the devil.” But it was not the kind of war his followers expected. They would fight the white man by exposing his crimes, letting the world know that he was the devil by selling newspapers.10
Selling newspapers? The men could not believe what they had just heard. What were they going to do with newspapers? Roll them up and swat armed policemen like flies? Edward 2X Sherrill, the captain of the mosque, exhorted, “I want all of you brothers to take at least fifty newspapers! Be sure you pay for them right now at the door.”11
Malcolm shared the brothers’ frustration with Muhammad’s passivity. He was even more outraged when an all-white coroner’s jury took less than thirty minutes to acquit the LAPD of killing an unarmed black man, claiming his death was “justifiable homicide under lawful performance of duty and in self defense.” The police shooting radicalized the black community, galvanizing the movement toward greater militancy and confrontation.12